Five Star Friday's Edition #103 Is Brought to You by Henry David Thoreau

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

— Henry David Thoreau

This Five Star Friday roundup is brought to you by the U.S. postal system, a question of gender, then and now, adoption, panties, homosexuality on television, anger at a mother, the exhaustion of parenting, good ham, good tweets, a stuffed animal, a list, environmentalism, depression, and health care reform.

Please leave urls to your own good writing in the comments, because we like you and want to know what you write.

Oh, for God’s sake. Yes, Lone Postal Employee, you have discovered my nefarious scheme. I stake out other people’s mailboxes until — oh happy day — I discover one that contains a postage due note. I take the note, drive to the post office, locate a parking spot a mere three blocks away, pay for parking, tell the dude standing next to my car that no, no I do not want to purchase a Street Sheet, walk to the post office, stand in line so long that I become the common law bride of Mr. Tobaccy McReekerson, and then my disgusting new husband and I live off the ill-gotten proceeds of oversized greeting cards that do not rightfully belong to me.

or all her courage as a mother in a way we never expected, I applaud my baby sister. For all her courage as a woman after giving up what was most precious to her and doing something good with her life, I am proud of her. For all her weaknesses as a sister and a friend while she was in her darkest hours, I forgive her.

Recently, I was starting to feel like a kind of satellite of love, orbiting my daughters with purse and pockets full of tissues, snacks, lip balm and sippys; delivering explanations, juice, stories, hugs, squabble mediation, undivided attention and under-doggies with an immediacy the patrons of a five star hotel would envy.

When I see children with dolls and stuffed animals now I can't help but think about how hard it is to be so little and alone in this world. Perhaps the shock of our physical separateness begun at birth echoes on through those early years, a nagging but nameless anxiety we can't quite shake. And so it makes a kind of sense that these stuffed things, these comfort-objects -- if only by virtue of their solidity and our ability to physically connect with, cradle, and hold them -- would make us feel less alone somehow. They are a child's reinforcements. They are their tangible rejection of our inherent aloneness as humans.

I long--LONG--for the days when we'd go out and pick our own beans and then string them and put them up in our own Mason jars and eat them all winter long in vegetable soups. I'm sure this memory is covered with a heavy haze of nostalgia, but it sure as hell beats buying something shrink-wrapped and gassed within an inch of its life, and which tastes like cardboard.